This short episode introduces you to the recent research I have done that connects our eating to our breathing. What we eat affects the way we breathe and the way we breathe affects our choice of food we eat.

A general reaction when people are presented with the challenge of switching to a whole plant diet is a sense of confusion as to what to buy, cook and eat, now that many of their usual foods are to be eliminated. This radical change to their entire cooking and eating habits of a lifetime is indeed a challenge. This is probably true, but what we eat has been something of a habit over many years, what we have been accustomed to enjoying with family and friends, but not really a habit impossible to change with determination, good organization, and enthusiasm. The good news is that probably over half the world's population are living pretty close to a whole plant diet, not perhaps by choice, but by tradition or by simply the economy of eating vegetables, fruit, and grains and not be being able to afford large amounts of other foods found in our Western diet.

Whatever your 4LeafSurvey score is, don’t despair if it was low, because everyone can improve on their diet following the advice given in this episode. The aim is to raise your 4LeafSurvey score by simple diet changes. You may have already noticed that the first four food groups all score positive, and the remaining food groups score negatively. So to increase your overall score it is obviously quite simple, you increase the consumption of the first four food groups that include: vegetables, fruit, grains and Omega-3 foods and/or reduce your consumption of the negative scoring foods that include: dairy foods, eggs, cows milk and cream, sugar, white flour, sweet & salty snacks, meat poultry and fish and vegetable oil.

The first stage in your journey towards better nutrition is to establish just where you are on this road already. Usually anyone wanting nutritional advice would attend a consultation with a nutritionist or diet specialist and spend perhaps over an hour completing a vast amount of form filling gathering data on your eating habits, nutritional requirements and so forth, however with the whole plant diet it is possible to gain sufficient information from a very simple questionnaire based on just twelve questions about your normal eating habits. This questionnaire is called the 4LeafSurvey and it is based on an eating concept designed to make it easy for everyone to learn how to eat a near-optimal diet.

So by now, you have decided to try to make a change in your eating habits, the question now arises whether to do this in small steps or you can do it in one giant leap. Which course you take will depend a lot on your circumstances but there are a few factors to take into account. What we eat tends to be a long-standing habit and almost, there can be an element of addiction to some foods or particular dishes, so this can present a problem in itself. Will you be just making the changes for yourself or for others you live with who may not want to join you on this challenge. Again, it depends on how well motivated you are to make this change if you currently have significant health problems it's understandable you would like to make the change quickly if however you are reasonably healthy you may be satisfied with taking your time and achieving the change over a period of months.

Let's begin with the basics. We need fuel for our bodies and this includes three major nutrients; carbohydrates, fat, and protein. Yes, we need all three to live and eating them in the right proportion. In addition, we need micronutrients such as vitamins, minerals, fiber, and phytonutrients. A whole plant-based diet contains all the above nutrients in the right proportions so long as it is sufficiently varied and balanced. A whole-plant diet offers roughly 80% carbohydrate 10% fat and 10% protein with plenty of vitamins, minerals, fiber and phytonutrients, the perfect diet. The typical Western diet as found in America and largely now in the UK is composed of a combination of meat, dairy, eggs, fish, and processed foods and provides approximately 40% carbohydrates 40% fat and 20% protein. Besides this, it provides very little fiber, vitamins, minerals or phytonutrients. As you see, it does contain an excess of fat, cholesterol and animal proteins which are all linked to major health problems.

We all know what we enjoy eating and most of us have been eating a similar diet for most of our lives unless you have tried various slimming diets or keep fit diets or other publicized diets which have promised improved health greater fitness or whatever. The choice of food we eat is one of the most profound activities we humans engage in. For 100,000 years man has eaten a diet which really derives straight from nature be it berries, leaves, roots from the land, the occasional insect or grub, the animals came his way and the fish fro the sea and rivers. Anything which in fact gave him some sustenance. One theory why humans have large brains compared with other mammals is that we were hunter-gatherers and had to have an encyclopedic knowledge of fauna and flora, when it was ready to eat, what was edible what was poisonous and where to find these sources of nutrition when they were in season, all this knowledge was essential for simple survival. The effect of this was that the environment that man lived in coped very easily with his appetite and little damage was done to it. Modern man, however, is a different matter, we have learned to farm industrially, we have learned to provide ourselves with a very rich, high calorific diet, seven days a week, 365 days a year by simply visiting our local supermarket and picking the food off the shelves.